Above all else, Dillon Brooks was just happy to be able to get home and play with his dog. While Zeus, a 70-pound, nine-month old Rottweiler, is one heck of a draw, the real reason Brooks was wrapping up a long weekend in Mississauga was because he had important business on Victoria Day: A pre-draft workout with the Raptors.

“Got to stay with my own family, got to sleep in my own bed, felt good,” Brooks explained after his session. “I got to see my dog, it felt good coming out here, playing for the home team.”

Brooks is one of 20 prospects the Raptors have looked at throughout four workout sessions, a relatively tiny slice of what their eventual decision-making process will look like. Last year, the Raptors didn’t host a single workout until June 1 and still managed to put 59 players through the ringer. Brooks is also one of five Canadians who have already worked out for the Raptors. That list includes his Oregon teammate Dylan Ennis, Xavier Rathan-Mayes, MiKyle McIntosh, and Maryland’s Justin Jackson. There could be more to come, too, as the growth of Canadian basketball continues to help populate the NCAA ranks.

Jackson, who is on the fence about remaining in the draft, would rank the highest out of the five if he stays in. He is the only Canadian ranked consistently near the first-round bubble, and he is the most naturally talented of the bunch. As a freshman, though, he could potentially improve his draft stock by playing another year in college. That might be disappointing for Raptors fans with their eyes on a locally produced player, but the organization will be watching, and Jackson sounds like someone they’re interested to see develop.

“He’s a player that’s very intriguing because he’s got so many things going for him in terms of size and positional size and athletic ability and God-given intangibles that you don’t find on a lot of people,” Raptors director of player personnel Dan Tolzman said Tuesday. “He’s got some work to do, skill-wise, but that’s what we’re here to do, to evaluate to see how far along is he, what levels can he reach with the proper development from there.

“It’s a good early look at him and he’s very talented and he’s going to be an intriguing player to watch if ends up going back. But if he stays in, too, he’s a guy that’s going to be discussed in our room, for sure.”

Working out with a pair of other Canadians he’s familiar with in McIntosh and Rathan-Mayes aided Jackson in Tuesday’s workout. While each workout contains players competing for a very finite number of positions, the camaraderie of a shared citizenship or having played together before can add a level of support to a difficult and exhausting process.

“That always helps because guys are more inclined to help you, talk to you and motivate you,” Jackson said. “That really helped.”

Jackson impressed, even if that might not matter until 2018 – on Wednesday, Jackson officially withdrew from the draft.

Brooks impressed, too. And Ennis. But plenty of players will impress over the next four or five weeks. As the Raptors sift through dozens of intriguing prospects, the fact that a couple – five or however many are to come – are Canadian won’t move the needle much on draft night. History suggests it won’t, anyway.

Justin Jackson, here playing for Maryland, is a highly touted Canadian basketball prospect. The Raptors showed interest in him. Photo by Brad Rempel-USA TODAY Sports

The Raptors have never drafted a Canadian player. They do, of course, employ Canada's Cory Joseph, one of 12 Canadians currently in the NBA and one of just three Canadians to ever play for the franchise (Jamaal Magloire and Anthony Bennett are the others, playing a whopping 458 minutes combined). But with 36 selections over 22 drafts, and 12 other draft-night acquisitions, the Raptors have had 48 opportunities to bring a player “home” via the entry draft. They have selected zero.

In the time the Raptors have existed, 20 Canadians have been drafted, including a pair who went back-to-back as No. 1s in Anthony Bennett and Andrew Wiggins and a total of four in the 2014 NBA Draft, when the Raptors had a pair of picks. It was that year that the Raptors reportedly came closest, making an effort to move up from No. 20 to No. 18 in order to select Canadian point guard Tyler Ennis (the Phoenix Suns allegedly asked for too much in a hypothetical swap, and the Raptors embarked upon the Bruno Caboclo experiment instead). A Canadian has been selected in the first round in every draft since 2011, and in the lottery in every draft since 2013, yet never by the Raptors.

The Raptors do not employ basketball players strictly for their citizenship. The presence of Joseph on the roster has nothing to do with his passport and everything to do with the potential they saw in him as a young, playoff-tested back-up to Kyle Lowry two years ago in free agency. The selection of Jackson, or whomever, would be for similar reasons.

“Not doing it on purpose. It’s a sign of what basketball is becoming up here,” Tolzman says of the heavy Canadian vibe early on. “It’s an indication that so many good NCAA players happen to be from the area…It’s been pretty impressive, even the last couple of years, the increasing numbers and I only see it getting more and more.”

Canadian basketball is growing without much history of Canadians on the Raptors, anyway. The best way to help grow basketball in Canada, it would seem, is not by employing Canadian players over more talented imported counterparts, but by sustaining the success of the country’s lone NBA franchise and supporting development at the grassroots level. The boom in Canadian basketball has not been borne of Magloire and Joseph playing for the Raptors, but of Vince Carter first bringing the Raptors to relevance. Later, it was fortified by the ascension to MVP-status for Steve Nash, a Canadian thriving elsewhere.

Steve Nash helped usher in a new era of Canadian basketball talent. Photo by Jeff Swinger-USA TODAY Sports

The growth of Canadian basketball has continued to flow and snowball from there, with the emergence of each successive Canadian feeding into and motivating the next player in the pipeline. There have never been so many Canadian NBA players, or as many worth looking at so closely at draft time. The future, too, is exceptionally bright, with Canada’s under-age tournament teams thriving and prospects like R.J. Barrett, Nickeil Alexander-Walker, Simisola Shittu, and Shai Alexander populating college recruiting rankings for the next few seasons.

A Canadian passport, then, is a nice luxury but only if it lines up correctly for the Raptors. Ennis may earn raves for his leadership, Brooks for his competitiveness, and Jackson for his natural ability, but their familiarity with the GTA is not placed in the strengths or weaknesses column.

“As long as they have a valid passport we’re good to go,” Tolzman explains. “We’re still an NBA team and I think we have a lot of the similar values to a lot of successful teams out there in terms of looking for players. I think when the kids get up here and they see our practice facility, they see the town, and get to see a little bit about what basketball means to this city, I think more than anything they get energized at the thought of being a Raptor, so it’s good.”

In these sessions, the Raptors are looking not only at skills and talent and the mental side of things for how a player might fit with the Raptors, but also how they might fit as a long-term development project. Outside of Jackson, any of the Canadians who have been brought in so far would be considered moderate reaches at No. 23. The Raptors don’t own a second-round pick, and while they’ve shown they’ll be aggressive in acquiring one in the past, the more likely case might see one of these players making their way to the Summer League or Raptors 905 roster as an undrafted free agent.

The Raptors have shown they have no problem bucking convention or consensus in the past. A player’s nationality is not going to be at the root of such a move. The player has to fit. So if this is ultimately the year the Raptors first draft a Canadian, it will speak to the continued growth of basketball in this country more than any agenda on the part of the organization. That wouldn’t make it any less meaningful for those involved, though.

“It would mean so much,” Brooks says. “Get to see my family every day, build this organization to be great…It’d be amazing to play in front of Canada every night and put a smile on the fans faces.”

Blake Murphy is a freelance sportswriter and a regular contributor to The Athletic Toronto. Murphy is also the Managing Editor of Raptors Republic, as well as a contributor to Vice, Dime Magazine, Fangraphs and more. Follow Blake on Twitter @BlakeMurphyODC.